The Pensamiento Educativo Journal (PEL), published by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, disseminates original international articles on educational research. The publication aims to share scientific content from studies that address educational issues from different disciplinary fields, with Latin American methodological approaches.
At the end of 2021, the Education Laboratory was represented by the work “Aprender a estudiar textos en primaria: propuestas para innovar en las prácticas de lectura de textos escolares”, authored by Angélica Sepúlveda, Nicole Paulet Piedra, and Beatriz Cardoso, published in Volume 58, Issue 2: Lenguajes para el Aprendizaje.
The content focuses on Learning to Study Texts (AET), an educational innovation program of the Education Laboratory that seeks to help 4th- and 5th-grade elementary school teachers incorporate language as a tool for teaching and learning, through an approach that helps students uncover the multiple layers of texts: not only “what they say” but also “how they say it”. One of the methodology’s objectives is to enrich teachers’ reading practices, so that they observe and explore with students the complexity of the language that makes up texts from different areas of knowledge.
The article published in the PEL Journal presents the program’s foundations and a pilot study conducted in 2016 with two 4th-grade elementary school teachers, who implemented the proposals in History classes for four months. The analyses included comparing teaching practices around reading instructional texts before and after learning about AET, as well as describing how these practices changed over the course of the intervention. The results indicate that, with the incorporation of the program’s proposals, the teachers began to offer students more opportunities to attend to, retrieve, comment on, and analyze the informational content of the texts. The study’s main contribution was to provide inputs for the development of the continuing teacher education methodology that the Education Laboratory has been implementing to this day.
The pilot study that gave rise to the article led to the production of other materials, including the Learning to Study Texts platform, which supports the training processes carried out by the institution, but can also be accessed directly by teachers throughout Brazil.
Over the years, in ongoing cycles of systematization, implementation, and research, the project team has refined its understanding not only of the activities to be carried out with students—the conditions that need to be ensured, the learning these activities enable, the challenges faced—but also of the training strategies that help teachers appropriate the didactic and content knowledge (both History and Language) that must be articulated in their pedagogical practice.
To learn more about experiences implementing the Learning to Study Texts methodology: access the Caieiras case here and the project’s directions in Várzea Paulista here.
The PEL Journal article, published in Spanish, can be read in full via this link.